Historically, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, as well as by governments of richer countries favouring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduced global economic welfare and...

We document the behavior of trade prices during the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-2009 using transaction-level data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. First, we find that differentiated manufactures exhibited marked stability in their trade prices during the large decline in their trade...

We assess the impact of U.S. trade policy uncertainty (TPU) toward China in a tractable general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms. We show that increased TPU reduces investment in export entry and technology upgrading, which in turn reduces trade flows and real income for consumers....

This paper examines home bias in U. S. domestic trade in 1949 and 2007. We use a unique dataset of 1949 carload waybill statistics produced by the Interstate Commerce Commission and 2007 Commodity Flow Survey data. The results show that home bias was considerably smaller in 1949 than in 2007 and...

This paper reviews the new approach to international trade based on firm heterogeneity in differentiated product markets. This approach explains a variety of features exhibited in disaggregated trade data, including the higher productivity of exporters relative to non-exporters, within-industry...

Empirical studies of firms within industries consistently report substantial heterogeneity in measures of performance such as size and productivity. This paper explores the consequences of joint heterogeneity on the supply side (sellers) and the demand side (buyers) in international trade using...

In this paper, we present for the first time a qualitative and quantitative comparison between trade in services and trade in goods at firm level for the same country. We focus first on static features of trade such as participation rates,, firms' characteristics, heterogeneity, concentration...

This paper explores the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over the both the short and very long run. Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting poor countries between 1865 and 2007. A single equation error correction model...

When prices spike in international grain markets, national governments often reduce the extent to which that spike affects their domestic food markets. Those actions exacerbate the price spike and international welfare transfer associated with that terms of trade change. Several recent analyses...

This paper explores Southeast Asia's trade performance over the four and a half centuries from 1500 to 1940. It identifies the determinants of the commodity export performance – falling trade costs, income growth of its trading partners, and improved supply conditions at home. It also explores...